What are spiritual experiences? I don’t think of them in religious terms. I see them as moments in which our awareness becomes more intense and more expansive than normal, so that the world around us becomes more real and alive, and we feel a strong sense of connection to nature and other human beings. We might feel a sense of joy or inner stillness, and feel that somehow the world around us is “in harmony” or has a meaning that we find difficult to express.

If a person from a religious background has such an experience, they may well interpret it in religious terms. They might see it as a gift from God, and believe that the aliveness and harmony they perceive is a glimpse of the divine, or of heaven. But if you’re not religious, there’s no reason to think in these terms. The experience is just a psychological one. It suggests that our normal vision of the world is limited and in some ways even aberrational. In awakening experiences, there is a strong sense of ‘seeing more,’ of expanding beyond limits and perceiving a more authentic reality.

My research shows that awakening experiences are connected to certain activities and situations. They are associated with contact with nature, spiritual practices such as meditation or prayer, sporting activities (such as running and swimming), and sex. They are also strongly associated with states of intense psychological turmoil. That is, paradoxically, they often occur in the midst of stress and depression, or in relation to traumatic life events such as illness, divorce or bereavement.

However, one of the most interesting things about these experiences is that they are apparently becoming more common. In a 1962 Gallup poll, just 22 percent of Americans reported that they had “ever had a religious or mystical experience.” In 1994, 33 percent of people answered yes to the same question, while by 2009, the figure had risen to 49 percent. Research by the Pew Research Center in the U.S. has shown a similar trend. In 2007, 52 percent of Americans reported that they regularly felt a “deep sense of spiritual peace and well-being.” In 2014, the figure stood at 59 percent. In 2007, 39 percent of Americans said that the regularly felt a “deep sense of wonder about the universe”—a figure which had increased to 46 percent in 2014. Perhaps significantly, these increases coincided closely with a decrease in interest in organized religion.

In the U.K., the surveys of the Spiritual Experience Research Centre have had similar findings. In a 1969 survey, the question “Have you ever experienced a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?” was answered affirmatively by 29 percent of people. In 1978, the figure had risen to 36 percent, and then to 48 percent in 1987. In 2000, there was a further steep rise to 75 percent—a 27 percent increase in 13 years (which was, coincidentally or not, exactly the same figure by which church attendance declined over the same period). (1)

A Collective Movement?

Why should spiritual experiences be more common now than they were a few decades ago? It could simply be that people are simply getting better at recognizing them, or are more open about discussing them. Now that there is more general awareness of spirituality in our culture, and concepts such as “spiritual peace and well-being” are a more common part of discourse, it could simply be that more people are describing their experiences in this way, when they might have described them in other terms in earlier decades.

Or perhaps it’s right to take the research at its face value. Perhaps spiritual experiences actually are becoming more common. This is the approach I take in my new book The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening. I suggest that spiritual experiences are glimpses of a new state of being that is slowly becoming more normal to human beings. This is a higher-functioning state that I call “wakefulness,” in which a person feels an enhanced sense of well-being, clarity, and connection. They have a more intense awareness of the world around them, a greater sense of appreciation of nature, a broad global outlook, and an all-embracing sense of empathy with the whole human race. In many ways, it is a permanent, ongoing variant of the ‘awakening experience.’

I have found many examples of people who shift into this higher-functioning state in the midst of intense psychological turmoil – for example, bereavement, serious illness, or alcoholism—I describe some of these examples in The Leap. This shift is quite common, and can be seen as a variation of “post-traumatic growth”—I sometimes refer to it as “post-traumatic transformation.” There are also hundreds of millions of people around the world who are gradually cultivating wakefulness by following spiritual practices such as meditation and service, or spiritual paths such as Buddhism, Yoga, or the Kabbalah. A constantly increasing interest in self-development, spiritual practices, and traditions is one of the most significant cultural trends of our time.

It seems to me that there is a collective moment towards awakening, which is manifesting itself in a variety of ways—one of which may be the increasing frequency of spiritual experiences.

Many spiritual traditions make a distinction between temporary spiritual experiences and a permanent, ongoing experience of ‘wakefulness’ or liberation. In the Hindu Vedanta tradition, this is the distinction between nirvikalpa or savikalpa samadhi (usually seen as temporary) and sahaja samadhi (usually seen as a stable, ongoing and permanent state of samadhi) (Feuerstein, 1990).

In Sufism, there is a similar distinction between fana and baqa (Spencer, 1963); likewise in Zen Buddhism, kensho and satori are comparable terms (Suzuki, 1956).

In the Christian spiritual tradition, there is a similar distinction between mystical experiences, and mysticism as a permanent state, as in the state of ‘deification’ or ‘theosis’ (Underhill, 1960). Maslow (1970) made a similar distinction between the ‘peak experience’ and the ‘plateau’ experience, or between ‘peak experiences’ and the ‘self-actualised’ state.

What is the basis of this distinction between temporary ‘awakening’ experiences and experiences of permanent spiritual awakening? In a study of 161 temporary awakening experiences conducted by this author (Taylor, 2012b), the ‘temporary’ nature of the experiences was emphasised in descriptions of them ‘lasting’ a certain amount of time, and possessing a certain intensity which faded away, bringing a return to a ‘normal’ state of mind. For example, one person commented, ‘I was conscious of not wanting the feeling to go away. But unfortunately it didn’t last long’ (Taylor, 2012b, p.7).

Nevertheless, despite being essentially temporary, the experiences were reported as having long term effects. Although they did not bring a fundamental, deep-rooted shift of identity – or a permanent state of oneness or heightened awareness of the phenomenal world- many individuals described them as bringing a shift in perspective and attitude to life, and a change of values. For example, they were reported as bringing a new sense of optimism, trust, comfort or confidence (Taylor, 2012b). One person had an intense awakening experience following a period of intense psychological turmoil, during which she ‘felt the most intense love and peace and knew that all was well’ (Taylor, 2011, p.4). The experience probably only lasted for a few minutes, but in its aftermath she found that the feeling of dread had disappeared from her stomach, and she felt able to cope again. ‘I looked around and thought about all the good things in my life and the future. I felt more positive and resilient’ (ibid.). Another person simply reported that the experience made her realise ‘how easy it would be to be happy’ (Taylor, 2010, p.7)

For some, the memory of the awakening experience – and the knowledge that this dimension of meaning and harmony existed – had a comforting and reassuring effect. One person reported that her awakening experience ‘Only lasted a few minutes but I remember a sense of calmness and stillness and it soothes me now’ (Taylor, 2010, p.10). (The poet Wordsworth vividly described this soothing after effect of awakening experiences on several occasions. For example, in Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, he describes his awareness that this ‘serene and blessed mood’ of the present will provide ‘life and food/For future years.'[Wordsworth, 2013].)

One of the most common after effects of awakening experiences is to create a desire to ‘return’ to this dimension of meaning and harmony, which often leads to an interest in spiritual traditions and practices. For example, in another awakening experience apparently triggered by psychological turmoil, a young woman experienced ‘a moment of enlightenment’ in which ‘all my “problems” and my suffering suddenly seemed meaningless, ridiculous, simply a misunderstanding of my true nature and everything around me. There was a feeling of acceptance and oneness’ (Taylor, 2011, p.8). This experience awakened a life-long interest in selfdevelopment. ‘In some ways’, the woman reported, ‘I have spent the last 25 years since exploring what it meant and how I could perhaps go back there’ (ibid.).

Similarly, one person reported how she had ‘spent my life searching for the feeling again because I know it’s there’ (Taylor, 2011, p.7). Another person described how, following her awakening experience, she felt drawn to books about spirituality, began to read about Buddhism, and learned to meditate (Taylor, 2011). While as a final example, a man who had a powerful awakening experience 40 years ago -without having any similar experiences- reported that this ‘tiny glimpse of my potential as a human being has had a huge impact on my life and work’ (Taylor, 2010, p.41).

The last quote recalls William James description of the ‘noetic’ quality of mystical experiences:

[Mystical experiences] are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance…as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time (James, 1985, p.380).
I suggest that this transformation of perspective and of values following temporary awakening experiences be termed a ‘secondary shift’, or ‘secondary transformational experience.’ The transformation may lead to significant cognitive and affective changes, with different values (e.g. less materialistic, more altruistic), different beliefs (e.g. belief in life after death) and a different attitude (e.g. more optimistic, more trusting). In turn, these may lead to significant lifestyle changes, such as new interests, new relationships and a new career. However, the ‘shift’ is still secondary in the sense that the individual’s previous ‘self-system’ and previous sense of identity remain intact. Since the individual’s ‘ego-boundaries’ remain essentially intact, he/she does not experience the intense connection or oneness or the intensified perception of the phenomenal world which awakening experiences frequently feature (Taylor, 2005; 2009; 2010; 2012b). These individuals experience themselves as the same continuous ‘ego-self’ as before, although they may possess a different ‘cognitive map’ of reality.

Temporary awakening experiences can be seen as a temporary ‘installation’ of a different, ‘higherfunctioning’ self-system’, which does not become established. Although temporarily disabled, the individual’s normal self-system is still intact as a structure, and so re-establishes itself.

The Primary Shift

It is tempting to describe this normal ‘selfsystem’ as a kind of psychic ‘mould’, which exists as a potential even when the system itself temporarily dissolves, so that it is able to re-form. In temporary awakening experiences, the structure is only in abeyance, with the mould still intact. But when permanent transformation occurs- in the form of a ‘primary shift’- not only the structure, but the ‘psychic mould’ itself dissolves away. It is replaced by a new psychological structure, or ‘self-system’, so that the individual does experience a new sense of identity. This shift is therefore more deep-rooted and fundamental. The person may feel that they have been ‘re-born’, even that the only real connection with their previous identity was that they are associated with the same body and name. At the same time, this transformation includes the characteristics of the ‘secondary shift’ described above. The new ‘self-system’ generates significant cognitive and affective changes, with different values, beliefs and attitudes. These typically occur to a more intense degree than a ‘secondary shift’ occurring alone (Taylor, 2011, 2012a, 2013).

This ‘primary shift’ can be seen as equivalent to the ‘awakening’. ‘liberation’ or ‘enlightenment’ described by various spiritual traditions -sahaja samadhi (in the Hindu Vedanta tradition), baqa (in Sufism), satori (in Zen Buddhism) and ‘deification’ or ‘theosis’ (in the Christian mystical tradition)1 .

In a recent study (Taylor, 2013), 25 individuals who believed they had undergone ‘permanent spiritual awakening’ were investigated. This study found that the ‘primary shift’ was most likely to occur in a sudden and dramatic form, rather than gradually. Of the 25 participants, 12 reported a sudden and dramatic awakening, with no previous knowledge or experience of spirituality. 7 reported a sudden and dramatic awakening, with some gradual development preceding this and some previous temporary awakening experiences, while 6 participants reported a wholly gradual process of transformation.

Most of these cases of ‘spiritual awakening’ occurred following periods of intense psychological turmoil, associated with events such as bereavement, illness, divorce and episodes of psychosis and depression. Many participants felt that their transformational experiences were triggered by this turmoil. Of the 25 participants, 9 reported psychological turmoil as the only apparent factor, while for 14 other participants it was reported as an important contributory factor. For 9 of these 14, some form of spiritual practice was also reported as a factor. In other words, these participants were engaging in some form of spiritual practice (in most cases, meditation) while experiencing psychological turmoil. In five other cases, participants were undergoing some form of psychotherapy (e.g. counselling, Hokami therapy –a form of bodywork– or the AA recovery process). Only one person reported experiencing transformation purely as a result of spiritual practice, including the reading of spiritual texts and studying with a spiritual teacher (Taylor, 2013).

When this shift occurred suddenly and dramatically, it was often attended with difficulties. Particularly if the person did not have a conceptual framework to help them make sense of their transformation (e.g. background knowledge of spiritual traditions and practices) and a supportive network around them, they were liable to become confused and to suffer psychological disturbances (Taylor, 2013). However, in most cases, the state did appear to become integrated and stable, even if this process took several years. (ibid.) Conversely, gradual transformations tended to be less beset by difficulties, and to occur in a more integrated and stable way.

This distinction between sudden and gradual spiritual awakening is similar to the distinction Grof (2000) makes between spiritual emergency and spiritual emergence. Whereas spiritual emergencies are sudden and dramatic, and often very disruptive to the normal self-system, spiritual emergences are more gradual and less disturbing. As Lukoff, Lu, and Turner (1998) note, ‘In spiritual emergence…there is a gradual unfoldment of spiritual potential with minimal disruption… whereas in spiritual emergency there is significant abrupt disruption in psychological, social and occupational functioning’ (p. 38).

All 25 participants -both sudden and gradualreported a shift into a new psychological state, with a new sense of identity. One described this as ‘a shift in consciousness and in identity’ and noted that she felt so different that when she returned to her home town she was ‘fully expecting to walk into the room and for family and friends not to recognise me. I felt so different, like a completely different person to be honest. All my internal frames of reference have changed’ (Taylor, 2013). Another participant reported, ‘I’m in many ways a different person now, living a different life’, while another simply stated, ‘I feel like a different person’ (ibid.). In answer to the question, ‘Do you think the transformation is permanent?’, another participant stated, ‘It’s like saying, is birth permanent? There are some things that are done and can’t be undone’ (ibid.).

All participants believed that this new psychological state was permanent, or at least ongoing. They reported it as fairly stable, although with some fluctuations and difficulties. One participant stated, ‘I can tell you that it feels stable. It’s been about three years now and it feels stable’ (Taylor, 2013). A small number of participants were initially worried that the state would fade away, but were reassured by its stability. One reported, ‘I worried that one day I would wake up and it would hit me like a brick, but it is permanent and I feel like I am in a growing developing phase at the moment, its not over yet’ (ibid.). In some cases a significant amount of time had elapsed since the transformation, but these participants did not believe it had faded. Two participants had begun a process of gradual spiritual development more than 20 years ago, while another had experienced sudden transformation 21 years ago. For 7 others, it had been between 10-19 years since their transformational experience, or since the onset of their gradual development.

As the quote above suggests, although all participants felt they had undergone a permanent shift, some believed that the state was not finite, not the end point of their development. As another participant put it, ‘I think it’s kind of raised me up a level if you like. It’s really a building block for me to move from’ (Taylor, 2013).

This deep-rooted identity led to major psychological changes, and major lifestyle changes. The participants experienced new modes of cognition and perception, a new relationship to their surroundings and to other human beings (including increased authenticity and compassion) and new values (including a less materialistic attitude and increased altruism, in some cases leading to a change in career). A thematic analysis showed that the three most prevalent reported characteristics of their new states were wellbeing/positive affective states, an increased ‘presentness’ (including the ability to ‘do nothing’) and a sense that this state is ongoing and stable (and possibly permanent). All 25 participants reported these characteristics. While other major codes, mentioned by 20 or more of the participants, were ‘Reduced cognitive activity/Less identification with thoughts’ (which many participants reported as having a ‘quieter mind’ than before), a ‘Reduced/Disappearance of fear of death’ (including a sense that life will continue in some form following the apparent death of the body); ‘Decreased sense of group identity/need for belonging’; ‘Episodes of intense turmoil or trauma immediately preceding transformation’; and ‘Sense of Connection’ (Taylor, 2013).

The study found that this ‘primary shift’ into a new psychological structure was most likely to occur following periods of intense psychological turmoil or stress, leading to a dissolution of the person’s normal self-system. This was associated with many different types of turmoil and stress, but common types were bereavement, depression, serious illness, addiction and/or encounters with death.

For example, one participant of this study described gradual spiritual development for around 18 months, while performing a meditative practice. Following this, he experienced a sudden shift which he described as ‘a change into silence when the mind quieted. It was the first time I was really aware of a palpable silence. And a lot of the busy-ness of my mind and the seeking energy fell away’ (ibid.) The next day, when he woke up he ‘felt like I was looking at the world from a place that was behind thought.’ This was followed, ‘three or four months later’, by a final transformational shift in which ‘Everything I looked at seemed to have no separate existence from what I was – he absence of all those dividing lines both in space and time. Space was just the dividing line between me and the floor or me and the door. It was as if the sense of time fell away, all those divisions of the past, present and future’ (Taylor, 2013).

In another example, a participant described how she felt she underwent gradual development while suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, during which she was aware of a process of ‘humbling or deconstructing the ego.’ During this period, she had what she described as ‘peak moments that changed the baseline going forward’, including one powerful experience in which ‘I opened my eyes and the world looked different. It was alive. It was infinite aliveness. Everything was bright. Even the space between everything. The colours were incredible and the flowers looked happy. I looked down and I realised I was the sidewalk.’ Following this, in March 2008, as she put it, ‘I moved into a stable state’ after participating in a personal development workshop (Taylor, 2013).

In another study (Taylor, 2012a), cases of ‘spiritual awakening’ following intense psychological turmoil or trauma were specifically investigated. In these cases, individuals typically reached a point where they felt they were completely ‘broken’ or desolate, and had lost everything. Often at the very point of accepting or surrendering to their predicament -the point of ‘giving up’, ‘letting go’ or ‘handing over’ their problem- they would feel something ‘give way’ inside them, and feel that a new self had emerged inside them, with new awareness and knowledge (Taylor, 2011, 2012a). In this study, it was suggested that this process was related to the dissolution of psychological attachments. Psychological attachments can include hopes and ambitions, the sense of status or achievement, wealth and possessions, social roles, and other human beings upon whom the person is emotionally dependent. The dissolution of these attachments is usually the main reason why a person is in a state of turmoil, and filled with a sense of despair or loss. Psychological attachments can be seen as the ‘building blocks’ of a person’s sense of identity. When the building blocks are taken away, the structure itself collapses. And this dissolution or collapse appeared to allow a new higherfunctioning ‘self-system’ to emerge and become established as the individual’s new sense of identity (Taylor, 2011, 2012a).

One participant of this study described her ‘primary shift’ in detail as follows:

‘The way it feels is that I’ve permanently broken through to another state. I’ve moved up to another level of awareness which I know is going to stay with me. One day, a shift occurs, and a different picture suddenly emerges showing you who you really are –an eternal being, far more powerful and amazing than you ever thought possible. I knew without doubt that I’d witnessed the absolute truth and, having experienced it with such clarity, there’s no going back. It’s like the transformation a caterpillar goes through during the chrysalis stage before emerging as a butterfly…

Now I spend a lot of time in the present. In the past, when friends came round and told me about their problems, I’d get really involved, but now my awareness is somewhere else. When I’m with them, I can feel this white light inside me. I can open my heart and let it flow out. Nothing upsets me the way it used to. Nothing fazes me. I know how to make stressful situations pass, by not focusing any emotional energy on them.

Material things don’t interest me anymore. I used to like home comforts, but now I hate having things I don’t need. I feel more inclined to give things away. I have no need for them. Behaviour –our thoughts and deeds– are much more important than material goods. I love being alone –just being still, going inwards. It’s ongoing –the deeper I go the more I realise– and the more I realise the more amazing it all is…

I have much less of a sense of a separate self. After my experience any opinions I’d formed previously about God/religion or other philosophies became irrelevant –there’s only One and we’re joined with it regardless.

When I lost my daughter I felt I’d gone to hell and back but after glimpsing heaven my grieving ceased instantly. There is only love; there’s no real pain or suffering or death. It’s impossible. My daughter could never leave me, except in the movie I’d constructed first in my mind which then played out in the outer world. Time only exists inside our cocoon, outside of it, eternity. She was always me and I was her. I am everyone, everyone is me, nothing is separate’. (Taylor, 2011, p.55).

The ‘Secondary Shift’ and Psychedelic Awakening

The notion of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ shifts will perhaps contribute to the long-standing debate on whether psychedelic drugs can be of value to spiritual development. One aspect of this debate is whether drugs can induce genuinely ‘spiritual’ experiences. Religiously oriented scholars of mysticism have doubted that this is the case, reluctant to accept that the experiences can be induced ‘artificially’, without divine assistance (e.g. Zaehner, 1957, 1972; Happold, 1986). This is not the place to debate this particular issue, which I have discussed elsewhere. (In Taylor, 2005 and Taylor, 2010, it is suggested that, although psychedelics can, under certain circumstances, induce genuine temporary ‘awakening experiences,’ there are also significant differences between them and temporary awakening experiences induced more organically, such as those related to relaxation and concentration, or to an ‘intensification and stilling of life-energy’.) The second strand of this debate is whether psychedelics can produce genuine permanent ‘transformative’ experiences. Are they simply temporary ‘glimpses’ into a ‘higher’ dimension, which fade away and leave the individual exactly as they were before, or can they bring about genuine transformation, or even enlightenment?

I would suggest that psychedelics can be transformative in the sense of generating a ‘secondary shift’, but not in terms of generating a ‘primary’ one. It has been well attested that psychedelic experiences can cause a long-lasting shift in perspective, creating new concepts of reality and an openness to anomalous or spiritual concepts (Conway, 1989; Strassman, 2001). This was illustrated by Pankhe’s ‘Good Friday Experiment’, in which 10 members of a group of 20 theological students were given doses of psilocybin, and experienced intense ‘mystical’ feelings and perceptions, including several powerful mystical experiences, similar to those of the great Christian mystics. In a follow up study six months later, 8 out of the 10 students said that the experience had had a powerful long term effect, deepening their sense of their spiritual and enriching their lives. And remarkably, this was still the case after 25 years, when most of participants reflected that the experience had changed them permanently, giving them a deeper appreciation of life and nature, an increased sense of joy, a reduced fear of death and greater empathy for minorities and oppressed people (Doblin, 1991).

In 2006, a study into the effects of psilocybin found that 60 per cent of the volunteers described characteristics of mystical experiences, with just over a third describing it as the most important spiritual experience of their lives, as significant as the birth of their first child. A follow up study two months later found that most participants reported that their moods, attitudes and behaviour had become more positive, while psychological tests showed that they had a significantly higher level of well-being compared to other volunteers who were given a placebo at the same session (Griffiths et al. 2006).

There have been similar findings in relation to Ayahuasca. As McKenna wrote, under the right setting and circumstances ‘regular and long-term hoasca [Ayahuasca] use may result in profound, lasting, and positive behavioral and lifestyle changes’ (2004, p. 122). McKenna cites the example of an Ayahuasca group whose members had a history of maladaptive behaviors such as alcoholism, substance and domestic violence. Following the regular use of Ayahuasca, this maladaptive behaviour disappeared (McKenna, 2004). Winkelman (1995) used the term ‘psychointegrator’ for Ayahuasca and other related plants, to describe their positive psychological benefits.

Other long term positive effects of psychedelic experience which have been identified include mental improvements, reduction or elimination of allergies, cluster headache prevention, anxiety relief and enhanced quality of life (Fadiman & Kornfeld, 2013). LSD has also been shown to have similar effects to Ayahuasca in relation to alcoholism. Several 1960s studies found a high recovery rate in alcoholics after psychedelic therapy, with roughly around 50% becoming long term sober, or drinking much less (Hoffer, 1970).

The transformative effects of Ayahuasca were described by a student of mine. Although he had had experiences of lucid dreaming he was ‘not very interested in anything remotely spiritual.’ He had a successful career as a computer programmer, and described himself as very materialistically oriented: ‘I was motivated by the money, the possessions, and the status that came along with “success”. I was very antireligious and I had donated money to the National Secular Society to support their work. My car was a very expensive “look at me” sports car.’

However, after taking Ayahuasca, his vision of reality and his values were transformed. After believing that he ‘knew it all’ he became aware of how limited his normal perspective was. As he describes it:

‘I saw that the seemingly endless desire for more money, things, and success, was not the key to happiness. My motivation changed to “give something back” to the world that had been so good to me. I retrained as a counsellor and worked as a volunteer with cancer patients at my local hospital. I became interested in “spirituality” and the underlying message of religion, and I donated money to the Lucidity Institute to support their work. My car is now an ordinary and very practical seven-seater. These changes have proved to be long term and the date of the experience, the 28th of January 2005, is as important to me as my birthday.’

As this experience and the others reported above show, the ‘secondary shift’ generated by psychedelics can be very powerful and valuable. Just as described earlier, in relation to awakening experiences in general, they can provide a glimpse into a new, hitherto unsuspected dimension of harmony and meaning, and ideally generate an impulse to return to that dimension, and to investigate spiritual traditions and practices as a means of doing so. As Huxley wrote of psychedelic awakening experiences, ‘The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out’ (1988, p.64).

However, I believe it is unlikely –in fact, I am aware of no cases of this– that psychedelics can induce a ‘primary shift.’ That is, I have not come across cases of LSD, ayahuasca or any other ‘psychedelic’ substances generating a shift into a stable, permanent state of ‘enlightenment’, a permanent dissolution of the normal ‘self-system’ and its replacement with a latent ‘higherfunctioning’ self-system.

Of course, the ‘secondary’ shift generated by psychoactive substances could possibly lead to a gradual ‘primary shift’ too. As previously mentioned, the experience of this new dimension of harmony and meaning, and the desire to return to the experience, may generate an interest in spiritual traditions and practices, which may, in the long term, lead to gradual, cumulative spiritual development -and perhaps a gradual shift into a higher-functioning self-system.

Conclusion

The ‘building block’ metaphor used earlier -to describe how experiences of loss and turmoil can ‘dismantle’ the normal sense of self and lead to a ‘primary shift’ -can also be applied to the distinction between a ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ transformative experience. If the ‘primary shift’ is akin to ‘moving out’ of your present building into new premises, the ‘secondary shift’ is akin to remaining in the same building, but making significant changes to it (e.g. renovating or decorating).

The ‘primary shift’ occurs when the individual assumes a new identity, when their previous ‘selfsystem’ dissolves, and a new higher-functioning ‘selfsystem’ establishes itself. This can happen both suddenly and dramatically, or gradually, as a result of a long period of spiritual practice or transformative lifeexperiences. The ‘primary shift’ is the radical transformation of being equivalent to enlightenment, moksha or theosis. The ‘secondary shift’ often follows temporary awakening experiences, including druginduced awakening experiences -a less deep-rooted and fundamental transformation, which does not feature a complete and distinct new sense of identity, but can possibly lead to a gradual ‘primary shift.’

So many of us strive so hard for material success that you might think there was a clear relationship between wealth and happiness. The media and our governments encourage us to believe this, since they need us to keep earning and spending to boost economic growth. From school onwards, we’re taught that long term well-being stems from achievement and economic prosperity – from ‘getting on’ or ‘making it’, accumulating more and more wealth, achievement and success.

Consequently, it comes as a shock for many people to learn that there is no straightforward relationship between wealth and well-being. Once our basic material needs are satisfied (i.e. once we’re assured of regular food and adequate shelter and a basic degree of financial security), wealth only has a negligible effect on well-being.

For example, studies have shown that, in general, lottery winners do not become significantly happier than they were before, and that even extremely rich people – such as billionaires – are not significantly happier than others.

Studies have shown that American and British people are less contented now than they were 50 years ago, although their material wealth is much higher. On an international level, there does appear to some correlation between wealth and well-being, partly because there are many countries in the world where people’s basic material needs are not satisfied. But this correlation is not a straightforward one, since wealthier countries tend to be more politically stable, more peaceful and democratic, with less oppression and more freedom – all of which are themselves important factors in well-being.

So why do we put so much effort into acquiring wealth and material goods? You could compare it to a man who keeps knocking at a door, even though he’s been told that the person he’s looking for isn’t at home. ‘But he must be in there!” he shouts, and barges in to explore the house. He storms out again, but returns to the house a couple of minutes later, to knock again. Seeking well-being through material success is just as irrational as this.

Well-Being Through Giving

If anything, it appears that there is a relationship between non-materialism and well-being. While possessing wealth and material goods doesn’t lead to happiness, giving them away actually does. Generosity is strongly associated with well-being. For example, studies of people who practise volunteering have shown that they have better psychological and mental health and increased longevity. The benefits of volunteering have been found to be greater than taking up exercise, or attending religious services – in fact, even greater than giving up smoking.
Another study found that, when people were given a sum of money, they gained more well-being if they spent it on other people, or gave it away, rather than spending it on themselves. This sense of well-being is more than just feeling good about ourselves – it comes from a powerful sense of connection to others, an empathic and compassionate transcendence of separateness, and of our own self-centredness.

In fact, paradoxically, another study has shown that this is one way in which money actually can bring happiness: if you give away the money you earn. This research – by Dunn, Gilbert and Wilson – also showed that money is more likely to bring happiness is you spend it on experiences, rather than material goods. (1) Another study (by Joseph Chancellor and Sonja Lyubomirsky) has suggested that consciously living a lifestyle of ‘strategic under-consumption’ (or thrift) can also lead to well-being. (2)

So if you really want enhance your well-being – and as long as your basic material needs are satisfied – don’t try to accumulate money in your bank account, and don’t treat yourself to material goods you don’t really need. Be more generous and altruistic – increase the amount of money you give to people in need, give more of your time to volunteering, or spend more time helping other people, or behaving more kindly to everyone around you. Ignore the ‘happiness means consumption’ messages we’re bombarded with by the media.

A lifestyle of generosity and under-consumption may not suit the needs of economists and politicians — but it will certainly make us happier.

We would do well to heed the words of the American Indian, Ohiyesa, speaking of his Sioux people:

‘It was our belief that the love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome. Its appeal is to the material part, and if allowed its way, it will in time disturb one’s spiritual balance. Therefore, children must early learn the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste the happiness of giving.’

Steve Taylor holds a Ph.D in Transpersonal Psychology and is a senior lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. For the last three years Steve has been included in Mind, Body, Spirit magazine’s list of the ‘100 most spiritually influential living people’ (coming in at #31 in 2014).

Steve is also the author of Back to Sanity: Healing the Madness of Our Minds and The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era. His books have been published in 16 languages and his research has appeared in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, The Journal of Consciousness Studies, The Transpersonal Psychology Review, The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, as well as the popular media in the UK, including on BBC World TV, The Guardian, and The Independent.

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From time to time, we all have experiences when restlessness and discontent fade away, and we’re filled with a sense of ease, well-being and harmony. We become free of pressure to keep busy and the need for stimulation, and rest at ease within ourselves and within the present moment.

I call these experiences ‘harmony of being.’ They usually occur when we’re quiet and relaxed and there’s stillness around us – for example, when we’re walking through the countryside, working quietly with our hands, listening to or playing music, or after meditation, yoga or sex. The chattering of our minds fades away and we feel a natural flow of connection between ourselves and our surroundings or other people.

Sometimes these experiences seem to come out of nowhere, for no apparent reason. You might experience harmony of being for a brief moment when you wake up in the morning after a good night’s sleep – just for a few seconds, before your thoughts start chattering away about the day ahead, your mind is empty and still, and you’re filled with a sense of well-being and wholeness. Or another morning, when you wake up early, go downstairs and sit at the breakfast table. There’s quietness and stillness around you, and you feel quiet and still inside too, a glow of contentment spreading through you. You look through the window at your garden, just beginning to reveal itself in the dim light, and you’re suddenly you’re struck by how beautiful it is. You feel as if you’re seeing it in a different way to normal, seeing flowers and plants that you don’t normally notice, and the whole garden seems so still and yet at the same time so wild and alive.

Or you might experience harmony of being when you’re watching your children play in the garden in summer. You look around you, at the sunlight splashing through the trees and the perfect blue sky above you, and listen to your children’s laughter – and the scene seems so perfect that time seems to stand still. Or even when you’re driving down the motorway and are suddenly struck by the beauty of the evening sun, shining between the clouds and across the fields – just for a few moments, you feel lit up inside too, and a warm glow of well-being flows through your whole being.

Harmony-Generating Experiences

Spontaneous experiences of harmony like these are quite rare though. Usually harmony of being is linked to certain activities or situations. For example, there are some sports which often give rise to the state. Several joggers and long-distance runners have told me that running has a powerful psychological effect on them, making them feel very calm and alert, and more ‘grounded’. One colleague told me that he goes running every day because ‘It helps clear my mind, helps me get back to myself. It puts me back in tune with the world again, after all the hassles of work. All the work stuff fades from my mind and I just take pleasure from where I am, from the elements around me.’

Swimming can also give rise to harmony. Once, when I was talking to a group of students about meditation, a young woman said to me, ‘That’s what I do when I go swimming!’ She went on to say that…

When I’m swimming, I get into the rhythm of my movements and the gliding feeling of going through the water – I get so into it that I forget everything. I just feel the water against my skin and look up at the light shining on the water and the waves moving across the pool and it all looks perfect. When I get out of the water and get changed I feel happy and peaceful.

More dangerous and demanding pursuits can generate harmony too, such as climbing, flying or diving. Activities like these require so much concentration that they help us to forget the niggling concerns of daily life. The demands of the present – to make the next maneuver or avoid a potential danger – focus the mind so much that thought-chatter fades away and the future and the past cease to exist. As a result, climbers or pilots sometimes experience a sense of wholeness and contentment, becoming intensely aware of the beauty of their surroundings, and even feeling a sense of oneness with them.

Sex often gives rise to harmony too, for similar reasons. The sensations we experience during sex are usually so pleasurable and powerful that they have a mind-quietening effect; thoughts about the past and future fade away, as we become completely present. Afterwards, you’re filled with a soothing glow of well-being, lying there with your partner in your arms, listening to the sounds of the night and staring into the warm, rich darkness. And then, you might pull back your curtain and look at the scene outside your window and feel that everything is somehow different. The clouds gliding across the sky seem somehow more real, as if an extra dimension has been added to them, and the black spaces between them seem somehow richer and thicker than before. And on the streets everything seems to be in its right place, the cars parked in front of your house and the trees and the streetlights along the side. The light of the lamps seems radiant and somehow benevolent.

Contact with nature is a major source of harmony too, and one of the main reasons why so many of us love the countryside. The beauty and grandeur of nature draws our attention away from thought-chatter, and the stillness and space relax us even further. As a result, our minds become quiet, and our ego-boundaries become softer, so that we transcend separateness and feel connected to our surroundings.

Building design in harmony with nature, Styria, Austria.

The Sources of Harmony

So what is it about meditation, sex, climbing or running which generates harmony of being?

The most important factor is that all of these activities provide a focus for the mind. There’s a steady stream of attention directed at a particular object, and this has the effect of quietening our thought-chatter. And when the mind is quiet in this way, we become free of both the disturbance and negativity of our normal thought-chatter. We feel a sense of inner stillness because there literally is stillness inside us. Our being becomes calm, like the still surface of a lake. And this also means that the super-critical person inside our heads – who’s always criticising our behaviour and reminding of the things we should feel bad about in the past and worry about in the future – disappears. There’s no one to make us feel guilty, to make us worry about the future, or bitter about the past.

In these moments, we become aware that, although the surface of our being is filled with disturbance and negativity, beneath that there is a deep reservoir of stillness and well-being. The surface of our being is like a rough sea which sweeps you to and fro and makes you feel disoriented and anxious. But if you wear diving equipment and go beneath the surface, you’re suddenly in the midst of endless silence and stillness.

The lack of discord inside us means that we’re free from the compulsion to do, and able to be. In fact, this ability to do nothing is one of the most pleasant aspects of harmony of being. We can sit down at the table or walk around the house and be content just to be here. There’s no impulse to turn on the television or the radio, to reach for a magazine or to check your e-mail or to phone a friend for a chat.

Permanent Harmony and Sanity?

These moments of harmony don’t have to be fleeting. In fact, this is basic aim of all spiritual traditions, and all spiritual practices: to generate a state of permanent inner harmony. This is what we call ‘enlightenment’ – a state in which the discord of the human mind is truly healed. In my new book Back to Sanity, I propose an eight-stage path of self-development leading to a permanent state of harmony, including practices such as ‘transcending negative thought patterns,’ ‘Healing the mind through quietness and stillness’ as well as traditional practices such as service and meditation.

In harmony of being, life becomes a glorious adventure, full of joy and wonder. And one of the most striking things about this state is how natural it feels. That’s because it’s our most natural state, a state in which we come home, to our innermost nature.

How to Generate Harmony of Being

Have contact with nature. The stillness and beauty of nature can quieten the chattering of
our minds and bring a sense of inner peace.

Help other people. Altruistic acts connect us with us and help us to transcend separateness.

Mindfulness exercises. When you have a shower, brush your teeth, eat your meals or any other daily activity, give your full attention to the experience rather than to thoughts inside
your head.

Make friends with quietness and inactivity. Timetable periods for ‘doing nothing’ during the
week. Quietness allows our minds to settle into a state of harmony.

Go running or swimming. Sports like these can heal the surface discord of our minds puts us
in touch with the harmony underneath.

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Great ideas and discoveries don’t come from thinking or doing, but from being.

In general, there are three different modes in which we can live our lives: doing, thinking and being. Most of the day we’re busy doing – working in our jobs, doing chores, following our hobbies and enjoying ourselves in our free time. Thinking usually takes place between activities, when there’s nothing to occupy our attention, or during activities which are more repetitive and undemanding, when we don’t need to concentrate too much.

And being? In general, we don’t spend much time being. Being occurs when we’re relatively inactive and relaxing. It’s when our minds aren’t chattering away with thoughts, and when we aren’t concentrating our attention on tasks or activities. In this mode, we usually pay a lot of our attention to our surroundings, and to our own experience. We’re in this mode when we go for a leisurely walk, do sports such as swimming or running, meditate, do yoga or listen to music.

Of these three modes, our culture prizes the first two far above the third. Doing and thinking are seen as the engines of achievement. Thinking logically enables us to solve problems and come up with ideas. If we have a problem, we sit down and think it through. And doing – working and being busy – enables us to achieve our goals, to be productive, to make money and become successful.

But being is unproductive. It is equated with laziness, and wasted time. Why waste our precious hours doing nothing when we could be filling them with activity and achievement?

Our politicians and business leaders would agree with this too. They need us to work long hours to keep the economy growing. For them, doing nothing means less production, a less competitive workforce and a lower GNP.

The Benefits of Being

But all of this is very misleading. On a psychological and a spiritual level, it’s extremely beneficial for us to spend time in being. It enables us to regenerate our energies, to re-attune to ourselves, and to regain the feeling of well-being and connection to the world around us. And even in terms of achievement, relaxing and ‘doing nothing’ can be extremely beneficial. States of being and inactivity allow the creative potentials of the mind to manifest themselves. They allow insights and inspirations to flow. It’s in these states that ideas suddenly come to us, seemingly out of nowhere – when songwriters have ideas for songs, when writers have ideas for stories, when scientists suddenly ‘see’ the answers to problems that have vexed them, when inventors have ideas for new inventions. These creative potentials are usually blocked by the busy-ness of our minds and our lives. In order for them to emerge, both our lives and our minds have to become relatively empty and quiet.

This is why many — perhaps most — of the greatest discoveries, inventions and creative ideas in human history have not come about through ‘hard work’ or sustained logical thinking, but by doing nothing. That is, they have mostly occurred by accident, or unconscious intuition, in states of relaxation.

The physicist Newton described how the ‘notion of gravitation came into his mind’ when he sat ‘in contemplative mood’ and saw an apple fall from a tree. (The apple didn’t actually fall on him, as is popularly believed.) The concept of coordinate geometry suddenly occurred to Rene Descartes when he was half asleep in bed, watching a fly buzz around the room. James Watt solved the problem of loss of heat in steam engines while walking in a park, an idea which led to the industrial revolution. (‘I had not walked further than the golf house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind,’ Watt wrote.) And as one final example, the physicist Nils Bohr effectively won the Noble Prize while unconscious. Drifting off to sleep, he dreamt he saw the nucleus of the atom, with the electrons spinning around it, just like our solar system with the sun and planets – and in this way he ‘discovered’ the structure of the atom.

It’s true that these ideas usually don’t occur completely out of nowhere – in many cases, the scientists had been grappling hard with the issues before the final ‘aha’ moment occurred. But certainly the scientists needed to allow themselves to relax and their minds to become empty and quiet in order for these solutions to arise.

A high proportion of the world’s great works of art were also inspired and conceived during moments of relaxed inactivity. The most recorded song of all time, “Yesterday” by The Beatles, was ‘heard’ by Paul McCartney as he was waking up one morning. The melody was fully formed in his mind, and he went straight to the piano in his bedroom to find the chords to go with it, and later found words to fit the melody. Mozart described how his musical ideas ‘flow best and most abundantly.’ when he was alone ‘traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep… Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them.’ Similarly, Tchaikovsky described how the idea for a composition usually came ‘suddenly and unexpectedly… It takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches and leaves, and finally blossoms.’ Similarly, many writers and poets have spoken of a ‘muse’ or ‘daemon’ which is the source of the creativity, which is beyond their conscious control, and provides them with inspiration.

A New Attitude to Inactivity

All of this illustrates that we have the wrong attitude to ‘doing nothing’. Perhaps we should stop thinking of relaxation and inactivity in such a negative light, and begin to see them as essential – not only for our well-being, but for our creativity and even our productivity.

Great ideas and insights don’t come from thinking or activity – they usually come through us, when we’re sufficiently relaxed. They come when we’re open to them, and thinking and doing usually close us to them.

Therefore progress of any kind – personal, spiritual, or creative development, collective economic or political development – does not lie in more activity, more hard work or longer working hours. If anywhere, it lies in more relaxation, more leisure time, more empty time to do nothing in. As long as we ensure that we fill this free time with being rather than doing, we might find that it transforms us from tired automatons into happier, more creative and innovative beings, with a greater contribution to make to the world.

About the author:

Steve-Taylor

Steve Taylor holds a Ph.D in Transpersonal Psychology and is a senior lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University, UK. For the last five years Steve has been included in Mind, Body, Spirit magazine’s list of the ‘100 most spiritually influential living people’.

Steve is also the author of Back to Sanity: Healing the Madness of Our Minds and The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era. His books have been published in 19 languages and his research has appeared in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, The Journal of Consciousness Studies, The Transpersonal Psychology Review, The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, as well as the popular media in the UK, including BBC World TV, The Guardian, and The Independent.

Connect with Steve at StevenMTaylor.com and Facebook.com/SteveTaylorAuthor.

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Steve Taylor’s latest book is The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening. His previous books include The Calm Center. He is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University and one of Watkins Mind Body Spirit magazine’s “100 Most Spiritually Influential People.” He lives in Manchester, England. Visit him online at http://www.StevenMTaylor.com.

What does it mean to be enlightened or spiritually awakened?

I don’t think there’s anything particularly esoteric about the state, and I don’t associate it with religions. I think of it as a shift into a more expansive, higher-functioning state of being – a state in which we experience a strong sense of connection with the world around us and other beings, a sense of inner quietness and spaciousness, and a heightened awareness of our surroundings. The state isn’t without its challenges, particularly in its early stages (when there may be some confusion and psychological disturbance) but in general it brings an enhanced sense of ease and well-being. It’s quite common for people to shift into this state after intense psychological turmoil. In my book Out of the Darkness, I describe many examples of this. It is also not uncommon for people to move towards this state slowly and gradually, over many years of spiritual practice (such as meditation) or through following specific spiritual paths, such as the eightfold path of Buddhism or a monastic lifestyle.

What are the three different types of wakefulness?

First of all, there is natural wakefulness. For a small minority of people, wakefulness is simply their natural, normal state. They were always in a state of wakefulness, without undergoing a sudden transformation and without following spiritual practices and paths. These people often become creative artists, like poets and painters.

Secondly, there is gradual wakefulness. This happens to people who follow spiritual practices or paths, or it might just happen as a result of their lifestyle, or events that happen to them. Wakefulness occurs gradually over years and decades. They gradually move into a more expansive and intense state of being.

Finally, there is sudden wakefulness. As I just mentioned, some people undergo a sudden and dramatic shift into wakefulness. Most frequently, this happens in the midst of intense psychological turmoil e.g. a diagnosis of cancer, bereavement, addiction etc. The turmoil breaks down a person’s normal sense of identity, and this enables a new sense of identity to emerge inside them. They shift a more expansive, higher-functioning state of being – in other words, into the wakeful state.

How can we tell the difference between fraudulent spiritual teachers and the genuinely awakened?

It’s a question of finding out whether they possess all of the characteristics of wakefulness. Some of the characteristics of the state are well known – a sense of well-being, a transcendence of separation, a quiet mind, heightened awareness. But there are some less well known characteristics – e.g. awakened people don’t have a sense of group identity, or feel the need to acquire possessions or wealth or power. They don’t feel the need to be admired, or feel hurt by criticism. They live very morally, without exploiting anyone.

So if a so-called spiritual teacher doesn’t display these characteristics then you should question whether they are genuinely awakened. Typical signs of a fraudulent teacher include living an accumulative lifestyle, needing followers around them to make them feel important, behaving immorally, not living altruistically or showing compassion, being wounded by slights, cultivating a sense of group identity amongst their followers, and showing signs of prejudice or enmity towards other groups. If your teacher shows any of these characteristics then you can be sure that they are not awakened.

How do different theories of consciousness explain (or try to debunk) mystical (or awakening) experiences?

Some psychologists and neuroscientists think that awakening experiences can be explained in terms of brain activity – that is, they are caused by abnormal types of activity in different parts of the brain, producing more intense perception, a lack of subject-object boundaries etc. In other words, they are a kind of hallucination.

I think this is highly dubious. For a start, the assumption that the brain is the source of our conscious experience is dubious. Some scientists assume that the brain gives rise to consciousness, just because they can’t think of any way of explaining it, but despite decades of intensive research, no one has the slightest idea how this might occur. In philosophy, this is called the ‘hard problem’ of how the soggy gray mass of the brain could give rise to the amazing richness and variety of our conscious experience. In fact, it’s just as to reverse this suggest that, if there are any particular brain states associated with awakening experiences, these states could be produced by the experiences themselves, rather than the other way around.

As a psychologist I’ve never been particular interested in studying the brain, and working how it which parts of it are active or inactive in different states. To me, that’s like studying a map of a place rather than exploring it as a reality.

Wakeful states exist in themselves, as experiences, and can’t be reduced to – or explained away in terms of – neurological activity.

Is it possible to awaken through psychedelics?

Psychedelics can definitely generate temporary awakening experiences, but it’s very unlikely that they will bring about a shift into permanent wakefulness. The reason for this is that psychedelics work by dissolving away our normal sense of self, and putting its psychological mechanisms out of action. This can cause temporary awakening experiences, but permanent wakefulness can only occur if there is a new sense of self to replace the normal one. It’s not enough to dissolve the sense of self – a new self has to replace it.

In fact, the danger of the regular use of psychedelics is that the structures of the normal mind permanently dissolve away, without anything to replace them, and so there’s just a psychological vacuum, or a state of psychosis. And unfortunately there have been many cases of this. In fact, you could say that this is really the only permanent psychological change which the regular use of psychedelics can bring: not awakening, but psychosis.

Having said that, I think psychedelics can have a positive effect, if they are used carefully. Although they rarely bring about permanent transformation, they can sometimes cause a shift in values and perspectives, make people see the world in a different way and re-evaluate their lives. They can provide a glimpse into a more intense reality that makes them realise that their normal view of life is limited. This sometimes creates an interest in spiritual practices and traditions, as a way of trying to recapture this vision of the world in a more integrated way. Look at Ram Dass! He’s the best example of this – a Harvard psychologist who took LSD, re-evaluated his life, became a spiritual seeker, and eventually one of the most inspired spiritual teachers of our time.

Are children naturally awake?

Yes! Certainly young children. Some spiritual traditions associate childhood with wakefulness, and see spiritual development as a matter of recovering qualities of our childhood state. The Dao De Ching advises us to ‘Return to the state of the infant.’ One of Jesus’ most famous sayings is ‘unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’

Children definitely have many of the characteristics of the wakefulness state – more intense perception, well-being, a strong sense of connection to the world around them, heightened energy, a lack of the need for group identity, of the need to accumulate, and so on. However, there are some significant differences between childhood wakefulness and the kind of wakefulness we attain as adults. For example, children don’t possess characteristics intense compassion, or inner quietness and stability. So children are naturally awake, but they’re not awake in quite the same way as adults. It’s a kind of immature wakefulness, which isn’t as wide-ranging as mature wakefulness.

What are the signs that the human race is undergoing a collective awakening?

I would say that there are five signs. The first four relate to individual experiences of wakefulness.

First of all, wakefulness seems to be natural for a small minority of people. There are some people who aren’t awake due to a sudden transformation, or to decades of regular spiritual practice – wakefulness is simply their normal, natural state.

The second sign is that temporary awakening experiences are very common, and seem to getting more common. As I showed in my previous book, Waking from Sleep, it’s very common for people to have temporary glimpses of the wakeful state, often when they’re inactive and relaxed, and their minds become quiet and calm. For a few moments, our normal ‘sleep’ state slips away and the wakeful state emerges, like the sun from behind a wall of clouds.

The third sign is that more and more people are feeling a strong impulse to awaken. More and more people seem to sense instinctively that something is wrong with their normal state of being. They’re aware that they’re asleep, and they want to wake up. This suggests that our sleep state is losing its hold over us.

The fourth sign is that awakening occurs so spontaneously and easily in response to psychological turmoil. As I’ve said before, it’s not uncommon for people who go through intense stress and turmoil to undergo a sudden shift into the wakeful state. Their previous identity dissolves away, and a new self emerges, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. In my research, I’ve always been amazed at how common this phenomenon is, and I think that it’s becoming more common.

Finally, there are cultural signs that this shift is underway. These have been growing for the last three hundred years or so. Since the 18th century, in many parts of the world, there has been a growing sense of empathy, compassion and fairness. There has been an increasing recognition of the rights of different groups, including animals. There has been a reconnection to nature, to the human body, and an openness to sex, And particularly over recent decades, there has been a massive (and still growing) upsurge in interest in spiritual philosophies and the spread of spiritual practices such as meditation, yoga, and other techniques of self-development. Everywhere there are signs of a movement beyond both ego-isolation and egocentrism, a growing sense of connection and empathy.

Even if this process is a gradual and fitful one — and even if it may appear to be still in its early stages — we appear to be in the process of waking up.

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One of the biggest myths about spirituality is that it reveals the world to be an illusion. According to the myth, when we ‘wake up’ or become enlightened, we realise that the physical realm of things is just a dream. The world and all the events that take place in it are seen as a mirage. Only spirit is real, which exists above and beyond the physical world.

One of the problems with this view is that it leads to a detached and indifferent attitude to worldly events. What does it matter if millions of people are suffering from poverty and starvation? What does warfare or ecological catastrophe matter? Why should we bother trying to fight for social causes or against global problems? It’s all just part of the dream, so none of it is of any consequence.

This attitude is often justified with reference to the Hindu concept of maya. This is sometimes translated as “illusion,” but its actual meaning is actually closer to “deception.” Maya is the force that deceives us into thinking of ourselves as separate entities and the world as consisting of separate, autonomous phenomena. In other words, maya prevents us from seeing the world as it really is. It blinds us to the unity that lies behind apparent diversity. It stops us from seeing the world as brahman, or spirit. So it doesn’t literally mean that the world is an illusion, but that it’s not as it seems. It means that our vision of the world is not complete or objective, that there’s more to reality than we superficially see.

The idea of the world as an illusion is sometimes specifically associated with Hindu Advaita Vedanta (or nonduality) philosophy, but this interpretation of Advaita stems from a similar misunderstanding. The most influential Advaita Vedanta philosopher was Sankara, who lived during the eighth and nineth centuries ce. Sankara famously made three statements (later reframed by Ramana Maharshi and others): “The universe is unreal. Brahman is real. The universe is Brahman.” If the first two statements are taken alone and out of context — as they often are — then they suggest a duality between the world and spirit: the world is an illusion, and only spirit is real. But the third statement, which is often overlooked, completely reverses this. The third statement says that the universe is spirit, and so the universe actually is real. Sankara is not literally saying that the universe is unreal, only that it doesn’t have an independent reality. It depends on brahman for its existence; it’s pervaded with brahman, and it can’t exist without it.

Ramana Maharshi (pictured), perhaps the greatest Indian sage of the twentieth century, held a similar view. He explained that the world is not unreal in itself. It becomes so when we perceive it purely in terms of its appearance and only see interacting separate objects rather than an underlying spirit. That world is unreal in the same way that a dream is unreal, because it’s based on delusion. But in itself the world is inseparable from spirit. It’s a manifestation of spirit.

This is exactly what wakefulness reveals — not that the world is an illusion but that the world as we normally see it is incomplete, a partial reality. In wakefulness, the world actually becomes more real, partly in the sense that it becomes more tangibly real and alive, more vivid and powerfully there, but also in the sense that it becomes infused with spirit. In wakefulness, we realize that there’s no duality, no matter or spirit, no matter or mind. We realize that the physical world and the spiritual world are one, with no distinction. The world is gloriously infused with spirit and gloriously real.

Nevertheless, the idea of the world as an illusion is appealing to many people, as it offers a way of circumventing problems. If you’re facing difficulties in your own life, and if the world itself is full of the suffering of your fellow human beings, then it’s comforting and convenient to tell yourself, “Oh well, it’s all just an illusion, so there’s no need to worry.” In other words, it offers a means of spiritual bypassing, that is, using spiritual beliefs as a way of escaping issues that need addressing.

A similar attitude is sometimes applied to the body. After all, the body is made of the same stuff as the world, so if the world is an illusion, the body must be too, or at least it can be seen as something different and inferior to the mind or spirit. There’s a duality between the spirit and the body, just as there’s a duality between the spirit and the physical world. This attitude can lead to a hostile, repressive attitude toward the body, an attitude of disgust toward its animalistic functions and impulses, including sex. This attitude is illustrated by early Christian Gnostic teachings, for example, which held that all matter is evil, and the body is a prison to escape from. But again, in wakefulness this duality is revealed to be false. The body is infused with spirit and is one with spirit. As Walt Whitman writes in “I Sing the Body Electric,” after listing dozens of different parts of the body, “O I say these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the soul, O I say now these are the soul!”

Steve Taylor Phd is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, UK. This is an edited extract from his new book The Leap. More information HERE

In the 1960s, there was a popular belief – popularised by psychedelic pioneers like Timothy Leary (pictured) – that drugs such as LSD could provide ‘chemical enlightenment’, a way of circumventing the years of arduous spiritual practice which monks and other spiritual put themselves through in order to attain a permanent higher state of consciousness. Why spend years meditating and practising self-denial when you can just alter your brain chemistry directly, by taking psychedelics? It soon became apparent that this was naive, and that regular LSD usage was much more likely to generate psychological breakdown than spiritual awakening. And many of those – such as Timothy Leary himself – who originally used LSD as a way of expanding consciousness eventually began to use drugs hedonistically, as a way of escaping boredom and discord, after their ‘chemical enlightenment’ project had failed.

Nowadays, psychoactive substances such as Ayahuasca and DMT are widely used with a spiritual intention, as a means of self-exploration and self-expansion. Ayahuasca in particular has a similar status as an ‘elixir of enlightenment’ to LSD in the 1960s.

I don’t think there is any doubt that psychedelics can generate temporary higher states of consciousness (or ‘awakening experiences’, as I prefer to call them). Some writers on mysticism – usually from a religious background – have argued that psychedelic awakening experiences can’t be ‘genuine,’ because they are artificially induced. But this is surely short-sighted and prejudiced. Psychedelic awakening experiences feature many of the same characteristics of other awakening experiences – intensified perception of one’s surroundings, a sense of connection or oneness to the world and revelations about the nature of reality, and so on. I’ve collected many reports of psychedelic-induced awakening experiences which feature these aspects (some of which I quote from in my book Waking From Sleep).

But although psychedelics can bring temporary awakening experiences, I think it’s very unlikely that they can lead to a permanent higher state of consciousness – that is, a state of ‘enlightenment,’ or in my preferred term, ‘wakefulness.’ The reason for this is that psychedelics are basically dissolutive – that is, they achieve their effect by dissolving away our normal mental structures, and putting our normal psychological mechanisms out of action. (I like to use the term ‘self-system’ for these structures and mechanisms.) When the normal self-system dissolves away, our sense of boundary disappears, so that we no longer experience separateness. Our normal concepts of ourselves and of reality fade away too, so that we feel we’re looking at the world and ourselves in a completely new way. The contents of our subconscious mind may open up into our conscious mind, as the boundary between them fades away as well.

This is fine for temporary awakening experiences, but permanent wakefulness can only occur if there is a new self-system to replace the normal one. It’s not enough to dissolve the sense of self – a new self has to replace it.

This is the major difference between prolonged spiritual practice and psychedelics. Prolonged spiritual practice (such as regular meditation or the following of a path such as the eightfold path of Buddhism, or the eight-limbed path of yoga) will gradually form a new self which will slowly supplant your old self – a self-system with much softer boundaries, a much less powerful sense of individuality and separateness, intensified perception, much reduced associational ‘thought-chatter’ and so on. This self-system may be so subtle and integrated within the whole of our being that you might not even notice that it’s there.

In other words, spiritual practice is basically constructive – it gradually changes the structures of consciousness, re-moulding our self-system into a higher functioning form. But psychedelics don’t facilitate the emergence of a new self-system. With the regular use of psychedelics, the danger is that the structures of the normal self-system will completely dissolve way, and without another self-system to supplant it, there will simply be a psychic vacuum, which equates with a state of psychosis. And unfortunately there have been many cases of this. In fact, you could say that this is really the only permanent psychological change which the regular use of psychedelics can bring: not awakening, but psychosis.

Of course, a person may decide to take psychedelics at the same time as following a spiritual practice, or it may be that the use of psychedelics is simply one element of a wider, more general spiritual path. In that case, it’s less likely that they will be disruptive, and more likely that they will have positive effects. The real danger is of using psychedelics independently, and particularly without any supervision.

There’s a further aspect to this though: psychedelics can be transformative in the sense that they can show us an expanded reality, and make us realise that the normal world we perceive is just part of the story. And once we’ve become aware of this expanded reality, it can change our outlook and our values. It can also awaken an impulse to return to the expanded reality in a more reliable, organic way – that is, through following spiritual practices and paths. This is a topic I’ll address in more detail in my next blog.

Steve Taylor is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, UK. This article is an excerpt from his book The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening.http://www.stevenmtaylor.com

What is spiritual awakening, or ‘enlightenment’? I don’t think there’s anything particularly esoteric about the state, and I don’t associate it with religions. I think of it in simple psychological terms: as a shift into a more expansive, higher-functioning state of being – a state in which we experience a strong sense of connection with the world around us and other beings, a sense of inner quietness and spaciousness, and a heightened awareness of our surroundings. I have found that it is not uncommon for people to shift into this state after intense psychological turmoil – in my book Out of the Darkness, I describe many examples of this. It is also not uncommon for people to move towards this state slowly and gradually, over many years of spiritual practice (such as meditation) or through following specific spiritual paths, such as the eightfold path of Buddhism or a monastic lifestyle.

When people attain this state, it predisposes them to more ethical behaviour. Because of the strong emphatic connection we have for other human beings, it means that we’re more likely to treat other people with compassion and fairness. It usually means that we’re less likely to exploit people for financial gain, or to use them as a means of satisfying our desires for power or sex.

However, there are many cases of spiritual teachers who do not behave in this way, who mistreat and exploit their followers, become prone to narcissism and megalomania, and whose personal lives are sullied by excess and impropriety. One well known example is the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. While he was reputedly a very wise and insightful teacher (at least initially), he became an alcoholic who abused and humiliated his followers and sexual exploited his female disciples. The American teacher Adi Da (also known as Da Free John, amongst other names) clearly had some experience of the wakeful state, as shown by a number of extremely insightful books. However, early signs of instability and narcissism intensified into full blown megalomania, until he regularly proclaimed that he was the sole saviour of the human race, and that the only possible way to become awakened was to become his follower. He also ritually humiliated and sexually abused his followers. As Andrew Cohen – a spiritual teacher himself – wrote, “How could a spiritual genius and profoundly Awakened man like Da Free John, who makes such a mockery of his own genius through his painfully obvious megalomaniacal rantings, leave so many lost and confused?”

The irony here is that in recent years Cohen himself has suffered many accusations of impropriety and misconduct from his followers too, including allegations of bullying and financial extortion. In 2013, as a result of these accusations, Cohen decided to step down from his role as a guru, after realising that ‘in spite of the depth of my awakening, my ego is still alive and well.’

Corruption and Projection

How is all this possible? In a good number of cases, it may be that self-appointed ‘spiritual teachers’ are simply self-deluded fools or charlatans. But I don’t think this is the whole story. At least to some extent, the failings of spiritual teachers are the result of the role itself. Some spiritual teachers may have been narcissists all along, but others are turned into narcissists. Such teachers may well be genuinely awakened to begin with but are slowly corrupted by their power and authority, to the point that their wakefulness dissipates, and they become lost in self-indulgence and delusion. Their egos become inflated by the projections of their followers, who treat them as perfect beings even when they behave unethically. Any cruel or exploitative behaviour is explained away as some kind of ‘test’ or ‘divine play’, and the teachers lose their moral compass. The egos they were supposed to have ‘dropped’ a long time ago become inflated to monstrous proportions.

The problem is that a shift into a higher-functioning, more expansive state of being (i.e. wakefulness) doesn’t necessarily ‘wipe the slate clean.’ There may be some old, lingering negative tendencies which become amplified by the role of spiritual teacher. There may be a tendency to narcissism or to authoritarianism – even just slight a tendency – which was never clearly visible before. But these tendencies are still extant, and what might originally have been a tiny germ of a negative trait becomes a grossly obvious personality defect. What might originally have been an insignificantly small tendency towards self-indulgence explodes into excess and degeneracy on a rock star scale.

There is a particular danger of this happening if a person makes a conscious decision to become a teacher soon after their initial awakening, before there has been time for negative traits to fade away. It’s also dangerous when spiritual teachers from the East move to the West – even more so, if they come from an eastern monastic tradition. They may well be unused to permissive Western attitudes to sex, and find themselves unable to control their sexual impulses. The overt hedonism and materialism of Western culture may have a similar negative effect. This helps to explain the sexual promiscuity of teachers such Chogyam Rinpoche, Swami Muktananda and Osho.

One of the problems here is that the role of spiritual teacher is so unregulated. There are no guidelines to follow, no regulations to ensure that teachers behave responsibility, or to protect vulnerable people. (This is part of the reason why I have written my new book The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening.)There isn’t even any reliable means of distinguishing fraudulent or deluded teachers from genuine ones. We only have our own intuition and discernment to rely on – which unfortunately may not always protect us from exploitation.

Steve Taylor PhD is senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, UK. His new book The Leap (from which this article is an edited extract) is published by New World Library (Eckhart Tolle Editions).

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What does it mean to be enlightened or spiritually awakened? In The Leap, Steve Taylor shows that this state is much more common than is generally believed. He shows that ordinary people ― from all walks of life ― can and do regularly “wake up” to a more intense reality, even if they know nothing about spiritual practices and paths. Wakefulness is a more expansive and harmonious state of being that can be cultivated or that can arise accidentally. It may also be a process we are undergoing collectively. Drawing on his years of research as a psychologist and on his own experiences, Taylor provides what is perhaps the clearest psychological study of the state of wakefulness ever published. Above all, he reminds us that it is our most natural state ― accessible to us all, anytime, anyplace.

Steve Taylor is the author of The Fall, Waking From Sleep, Out of the Darkness and his latest book Back to Sanity. Eckhart Tolle has described his work as ‘an important contribution to the global shift in consciousness.’ Steve is a lecturer in transpersonal psychology at Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK. In 2012 he was included (at no.31) in Mind, Body, Spirit magazine’s list of ‘The 100 most spiritually influential living people.’ He also writes poetry – his first book of poems, The Meaning, has just been published.

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Modern humans have lost touch with their inner ‘true self’. Silence and stillness are a means to recovering happiness and contentment. In the modern world silence has practically ceased to exist.

The human race has stamped its authority over the planet Earth not just by covering its surface with concrete and destroying its plant and animal life, but also by burying the natural sounds of the Earth beneath a cacophony of man-made noise. We live our lives against the background of this cacophony, with the jagged mechanical sounds of urban-industrial society continually assaulting our ears: the roar of trucks, aeroplanes and trains, the clanging and thudding of machinery, the noise of building and renovating, the chatter of radios and TVs in other people’s cars and houses, and pop music blaring from every conceivable place.

But nothing, of course, has done more to obliterate silence than the car. In the modern world it’s very difficult to go anywhere where there’s no possibility of being disturbed by the sound of passing cars, and the only chance that city or town dwellers get to experience something of the quietness which existed everywhere in the pre-car world is sometimes on Sundays, when the mad rushing to and fro of modern life slows down. This quietness seems so foreign now that it seems difficult to believe that a hundred years ago and before it was everywhere all the time. Back then this quietness would even have filled the busiest city centres, which would have probably had a noise level equivalent to that of a modern small village.

There’s also more noise than ever before inside our houses. It’s unusual to go into a house nowadays where there isn’t at least one television set chattering away somewhere, even if the residents aren’t actually watching it, and other forms of home entertainment compete against TV to produce the most noise: radios, CD players, computer and video games etc. In fact the only sound which is largely absent from people’s houses nowadays is the voices of their occupants actually talking to one another.

Living in the midst of all this noise is bound to have a bad effect on us. All man-made noise is fundamentally disturbing. We find the sound of birds singing or of wind rushing through trees pleasing, but mechanical noise always jars and grates. And since we live our lives against a background of mechanical noise it follows that there’s always an undercurrent of agitation inside us, produced by the noise. This noise is certainly one of the reasons why modern life is so stressful as well. In modern life our senses are bombarded with massive amounts of external stimuli. Our fields of vision are always crowded with different (and constantly shifting) things, and our ears are bombarded with a bewildering variety of sounds — all of which clamour for our attention. Our senses have to absorb and process all this material, which takes up a lot of energy, and means that we’re liable to become drained of energy or ‘run down’ easily.

We can get out of this state by removing ourselves from all external stimuli and letting our energy-batteries naturally recharge themselves i.e., by relaxing. But there’s so much external stimuli around in the modern world and people are so unaccustomed to the absence of it that we may never be able relax properly, which could mean living in a permanently ‘run down’ state.

This lack of quietness has also meant is that people are no longer used to silence, and have even, as a result, become afraid of it. Along with inactivity, silence has become something which most people are determined to avoid at all costs, and which, when they are confronted with it, unnerves them. People have become so used to the frantic pace and the ceaseless activity of modern life that they feel uneasy when they’re left at a loose end with nothing to occupy their attention even for a few moments, and they feel equally uneasy when the noise they live their lives against the background of subsides. Why else is it that they need to have their radios and televisions chattering away in the background even when they’re not paying attention to them?

In other words, in the modern world silence has become an enemy. And this is a terrible shame, because in reality silence is one of our greatest friends, and can if it’s allowed to reveal itself to us have a powerfully beneficial effect on us.

Inner Noise

It’s not just the noise outside us which causes us problems, though, but also the noise inside us.

In the same way that the natural quietness and stillness of the world around us is always covered over with man-made noise, the natural quietness of our minds is constantly disturbed by the chattering of our ego-selves. This chattering fills our minds from the moment we wake up in the morning till the moment we go to sleep at night an endless stream of daydreams, memories, deliberations, worries, plans etc. which we have no control over and which even continues (in the form of dreams) when we fall asleep. This ‘inner noise’ has as many bad effects as the mechanical noise outside us. It actually creates problems in our lives, when we mull over tiny inconveniences or uncertainties which seem to become important just because we’re giving so much attention to them, and when we imagine all kinds of possible scenarios about future events instead of just taking them as they come. It means that we don’t live in the present, because we’re always either planning for and anticipating the future or remembering the past, “wandering about in times that do not belong to us and never thinking of the one that does” as Blaise Pascal wrote. And this constant inner chattering also means that we can never give our full attention to our surroundings and to the activities of our lives. Our attention is always partly taken up by the thoughts in our minds, so that wherever we are and whatever we’re doing we’re never completely there.

It’s probably possible to say that there’s also more of this ‘inner noise’ inside human beings than there’s ever been before. The hectic pace and the constant activity of our lives, the massive amount of external stimuli we’re bombarded with, and the barrage of information which the mass media sends our way, have made our minds more restless and active. We’ve got to juggle dozens of different problems and concerns in our minds just to get by from day to day, and every new thing we see or every new piece of information which is sent our way is potentially the beginning of a whole new train of thought to occupy our minds.

The True Self

Ultimately, the most serious consequence of both this inner chattering and the noise and activity of the modern world is that they separate us from our true selves.

Our ‘true self’ might be called the ground, or the essence, of our beings. It’s the pure consciousness inside us, the consciousness-in-itself which remains when we’re not actually conscious of anything. It’s what remains when our the activity of our senses and the activity of our minds cease. The sense-impressions we absorb from the world and the thoughts which run through our minds are like the images on a cinema screen, but our ‘true self’ is the cinema screen itself, which is still there even when there aren’t any images being projected on to it.

Experiencing this ‘consciousness-in-itself’ can have a massively therapeutic effect. It brings a sense of being firmly rooted in ourselves, of being truly who we are. We also have a sense of being truly where we are, realising that before we were only half-present, and everything we see around us seems intensely real and alive, as if our perceptions have become much more acute. But above all, we experience a profound sense of inner peace and natural happiness. As the Hindu and Buddhist traditions have always held, the nature of consciousness-in-itself (which means the consciousness inside us and the consciousness which pervades the whole universe) is bliss. Getting into contact with the pure consciousness inside us enables us, therefore, to experience this bliss. Indeed, it could be said that it’s only when we do this that we can experience true happiness. Usually what we think of as happiness is hedonistic or ego-based that is, based around pressing instinctive ‘pleasure buttons’ or around receiving attention and praise from others and increasing our self-esteem. But the kind of deep and rich happiness we experience when we’re in touch with the ground or essence of our beings is a natural, spiritual happiness, which doesn’t depend on anything external, and doesn’t vanish as soon as the thing which produced it is taken away. It’s a happiness which comes from experiencing the divine inside us and also the divine inside everything else, since the pure consciousness inside us is the same pure consciousness inside everything else, and the pure consciousness of the universe itself.

Making Contact with the True Self

Whether we’re in touch with this ‘true self’ or not depends on how much external stimuli our senses are taking in from the world around us, and on how much activity there is going on in our minds.

If there is a lot of noise, movement and activity taking place around us then we can’t help but give our attention to it; and in the same way, when there is a lot of ‘inner noise’ taking place we have to give our attention to that too. And when our attention is completely absorbed in this way either by external stimuli on their own, such as when we watch TV; by ‘inner noise’ on its own, such as when we daydream; or by both of them at the same time it’s impossible for us to be in contact with our ‘true self’ to any degree, in the same way that it’s impossible to see a cinema screen in itself when it’s full of dancing images. Being in contact with our ‘true self’ is a state of attentionless-ness, when our minds are completely empty.

What we have to do if we want to get into contact with this part of ourselves is, therefore, to withdraw our attention from these things. And this is, of course, what we do when we meditate: first of all, we remove ourselves from external stimuli, by sitting in a quiet room and closing our eyes. And then there’s only ‘inner noise’ standing between us and consciousness-in-itself, which we try to quieten by concentrating on a mantra or on our breathing. If we manage to stop the inner noise (and therefore stop our attention being absorbed in it) pure consciousness immerses us and we become our true selves.

And this brings us back to the most serious problem caused by the massive amount of external stimuli (including noise) which our senses are bombarded with in the modern world, and by the intensified ‘inner noise’ which modern life generates. It’s not just a question of completely closing yourself off to external stimuli and shutting down ‘inner noise’, so that you can experience a state of total immersion in pure consciousness. It’s possible to have a foot in both camps, so to speak; to live a normal life in the world, being exposed to external stimuli and experiencing inner noise, and at the same time still be rooted in your real self. That is, it’s possible to be partially immersed in consciousness-in-itself, and for your attention to be partially absorbed by external stimuli and inner talk. But this can only happen when there is just a moderate degree of both of the latter.

It would probably have been quite easy for our ancestors to live in this way, because they weren’t exposed to a great deal of external stimuli and because their lives were relatively slow-paced and stress-free, which would have meant that their attention needn’t have been completely absorbed by external stimuli and inner talk. Perhaps this even partly explains why native peoples seem to possess a natural contentment which modern city dwellers have lost because their more sedate lives mean that they’re able to be in touch with the ground of their being as they go about their lives, and that they can therefore continually experience something of the bliss of which is the nature of consciousness-in-itself.

For us, however, this has become very difficult. There’s always so much noise and activity both inside and outside us that our attention is always completely absorbed, so that we can’t be in contact with our real selves. We spend all our time living outside ourselves, lost in the external world of activity and stimuli or in the inner world of our own thoughts. We’re like a person who plans to go away for a few days but finds so much to occupy them in the place they go to that they never go home again, and never again experience the peace and contentment which lie there. This is certainly one of the reasons why so many people nowadays seem to live in a state of dissatisfaction — because they’ve lost touch with the natural happiness inside them. That natural happiness has been buried underneath a storm of external stimuli and what Meister Eckhart called ‘the storm of inward thought’.

As a result of this it’s essential for us, in the modern world, to go out of our way to cultivate silence ourselves. Circumstances may oblige us to live in cities, and our jobs may be stressful and demanding, but we’re still free to remove ourselves from external stimuli and to try to quieten our minds by meditating, going out into the countryside, or just by sitting quietly in our rooms. We don’t have to fill our free time with attention-absorbing distractions like TV and computer games, which take us even further away from ourselves. We should do the opposite: stop our attention being absorbed like this so that we can find ourselves again.

We need silence and stillness to become our true selves and to be truly happy. ‘Be still,’ said Jesus, ‘and know that I am God.’ But he might have added, ‘and know that you are God.’Steve Taylor holds a Ph.D in Transpersonal Psychology and is a senior lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. For the last three years Steve has been included in Mind, Body, Spirit magazine’s list of the ‘100 most spiritually influential living people’ (coming in at #31 in 2014).

Steve is also the author of Back to Sanity: Healing the Madness of Our Minds and The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era. His books have been published in 16 languages and his research has appeared in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, The Journal of Consciousness Studies, The Transpersonal Psychology Review, The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, as well as the popular media in the UK, including on BBC World TV, The Guardian, and The Independent.

A few years ago, while doing research for my Ph.D., I met a woman who had a profound personal transformation following traumatic experiences as a soldier.

The woman (whom I will call Jenny) was in the Canadian military for 10 years, undergoing a great deal of stress and suffering. Towards the end of the 10 years, she began to feel depressed and burnt out and was diagnosed with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). She felt that she had completely lost her sense of identity. As Jenny told me, “There was just me, on the couch, doing nothing, because I literally couldn’t do anything. I was forced to see my failure. And I had no idea who I was anymore.”

However, after about a year of medical and psychological treatment, Jenny became relatively functional again and sought out alternative treatments to help her further. After a couple of years of deliberate healing and growth through various therapies and treatments, she began to experience a shift. She had powerful ‘awakening experiences’ in which, as she describes it, “the world looked different. It was alive. It was infinite aliveness. Everything was bright. Even the space between everything. The colours were incredible and the flowers looked happy.”

Soon this developed into a state of continual well-being, in which she felt intensely present, with a strong sense of connection to nature and other human beings. Jenny summarised the shift she has experienced as follows, “When you’re present all the time every day seems full. A day seems to last for such a long time…I used to look to possessions as a way to feel better but now I don’t need to feel better. I don’t need things. I can have them, but I don’t need them.”

This is a powerful example of what I call ‘post-traumatic transformation.’ PTT (as I refer to it in short) is similar to ‘post-traumatic growth,’ when people develop in a positive way in the aftermath of traumatic experiences. However, in ‘post-traumatic transformation’, the change is more radical, and usually occurs suddenly and dramatically, in the midst of intense psychological turmoil. (I wrote about my research in my recent book Out of the Darkness.) The shift is so dramatic and so life-changing that it is often described in terms of a ‘spiritual awakening.’

The shift is often related to a diagnosis of cancer, bereavement, intense stress or depression. However, in recent years, I’ve become aware that the intense stress and turmoil of combat may be a trigger for the shift too, as it was for Jenny.

Cases from the First and Second World Wars

At the beginning of the First World War, a young aristocratic German man named Karlfried Graf Von Durckheim believed it was his patriotic duty to fight for his country. After his privileged upbringing, the horrors of the battlefield were a massive shock. He lost count of the number of deaths he witnessed, and the number of times he came close to death himself. However, the close proximity of death triggered a transformation in him. It made him aware of a deeper, spiritual part of his being. As he wrote, “When death was near and I accepted that I also might die, I realized that within myself was something that has nothing whatsoever to do with death.”

This was the beginning of a lifelong spiritual journey for Durckheim. After the war he renounced his family property and inheritance, and began to study eastern spiritual texts. And later, after the Second World War, he came across many examples of a similar transformation amongst those who had lived through its horrors. As he later stated, “There are so many people who went through the battlefields, through the concentration camps, through the bombing raids…[who] were wounded and nearly torn in pieces, and they experienced a glimpse of their eternal nature.”

One example of this I came across recently in my own research was a man called J.H. Murray, who spent three years as a prisoner of war during the Second World War. While enduring the terrible deprivation of a German concentration camp, Murray had a powerful awakening experience. He wrote about it for the first time in a memoir towards the end of his life:

As I climbed upstairs, to the dormitory, I became aware of an extraordinary sense of joy. It suffused mind and body…I had stepped out of time into timelessness…I remember seeing through the windows the barbed wire fence with its sentry towers, and the prisoners in the compound, all and each transfigured by a beauty that glowed through them, engulfing all as if from another place. Its intensity had a new dimension, so that never afterwards could I bring myself to speak of it, or write down the experience until now, when I know that my life nearing its end.

After this experience, Murray wrote letters to his family, saying that he was “happy and thoroughly well.” They thought he must have gone mad, but he told them that “I have not lost my reason, but all worries, anxieties and frustrations.” He described experiencing “an undivided mind, inner stillness, self-realisation, and a fullness that I never believed possible.”

More Recent Examples

A few years ago, I published a book called Waking From Sleep. which is a study of awakening experiences such as Murray’s – moments in which our normal awareness seems to expand and intensify, and we become aware of deeper (or higher) level of reality, and perceive a sense of harmony and meaning. Last year I received an e-mail from an American man who said he had had such an experience as a solider in Vietnam in 1968. His combat base came under heavy attack, with major casualties, and he was sure that he was going to die too. As he described it:

At one point after carrying yet another severely wounded Marine to a waiting chopper something happened to me…I came out of myself. I expanded infinitely. I disappeared. It didn’t last long but it was the most powerful experience I’ve ever had. From that moment my anxiety disappeared and I knew that everything was alright, no matter if I lived or died. The Battle of Khe Sanh lasted 77 days. I felt peaceful for the remainder of the battle. I was not wounded in those 77 days although according to Ray Stubbe in Valley of Decision we had over 2,500 Marines wounded and over 800 killed. I’ve spent the last forty-seven years trying without success to replicate that experience. I even died on an operating room table. Nothing has come close to my “awakening experience” at Khe Sanh.

I’ve recently been reading a great book called Aftershock by the UK journalist Matthew Green, which is largely an investigation into cases of PTSD in British soldiers. However, the book also describes some amazing awakening experiences during battle, and the long term spiritual growth that these led to. Green tells the story of a man called Gus, who fought in the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina in the 1980s. One day, while waiting for orders on the battlefield, Gus had a life-changing experience. As Green describes it, “As he waited for the order to advance, he felt an inexplicable sense of euphoria, as if past and future had dissolved and his personal fate was no longer of the slightest consequence. He was witnessing history, yet touching the realm of the timeless.” Gus suffered PTSD after the war, until he discovered meditation, and realised that he didn’t have to identify with his traumatic thoughts and feelings. He became a Buddhist, and in 2007 he returned to the Falklands Islands, and left a small statue of the Buddha at the site of one of the major battles of the war.

These experiences are paradoxical on many levels. It seems incredible that the brutality of war should be associated with such states of inner peace and harmony. And in a more general sense, it’s paradoxical that states of intense stress and turmoil should be so closely related to states of joy and liberation. It’s almost as if joy and despair aren’t opposites, but are somehow symbiotically related.(This relates to the question of why such experiences occur during or after combat, or in other situations of stress and turmoil. I don’t have space to offer my suggested explanation here, but see my book Out of the Darkness for details.)

In the meantime, I’ll soon be beginning a formal research project on these experiences. So let me know (in the comments section below, or by e-mail at essytaylor@live.co.uk) if you have had a similar experience, or know of others who have.

Steve Taylor, Ph.D., is senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, UK. He is the author of several books on psychology and spirituality, including Out of the Darkness.http://www.stevenmtaylor.com
Source: AWAKEN

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We normally perceive ourselves as individuals, living inside our own brains and bodies. ‘You’ are an entity that seems to occupy your own mental space, inside your head, with the rest of the world appearing to be ‘out there’, on the other side. The conventional scientific view seems to validate this impression of individuality. It suggests that, in essence, we human beings are agglomerations of material particles, atoms and molecules that work together to form different parts of our bodies and organising the interactions between them. Our minds – and all our mental phenomena – are the result of the combined activity of brain cells.

So it seems indisputable that we are distinct, isolated entities living in separateness to one another. I have my body and brain, and you have yours, and we can touch each other physically or communicate with one another through language, but our sense of being – as produced by our brains – is essentially enclosed within the physical stuff of our bodies.

However, most of us regularly have experiences that seem to contradict this impression of separateness. I call these ‘interconnective experiences’, and identity three types of them.

Three Different Types of Interconnection

The first – and most common – is ‘interconnectedness of feeling’, or ‘empathic connection.’ Empathy is sometimes seen as a cognitive ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and imagine what they are experiencing. This is certainly a type of empathy, but only what I have called ‘shallow empathy.’ There is a deeper kind of empathy which stems from actually sensing – rather than just imagining – what another person is experiencing. In this ‘deep empathy’ our consciousness seems to expand outwards, and merge into other people’s. We seem to enter into other people’s mind-space, and share their feelings. If they are feeling sad, we sense their sadness. If they are hurt, we sense their pain. This often leads to altruism – acting to try to alleviate their suffering. We want to alleviate other people’s suffering because, in a sense, it is our own suffering.

The second type of experience is ‘interconnectedness of being.’ For many years, I have collected reports of what I call ‘awakening experiences’, in which people experience a more expansive and intense state of being. One of the most prominent characteristics of these experiences is a ‘transcendence of separateness.’ It’s very common for people to sense that they are deeply connected to – even one with – the natural world, other human beings or even the whole universe. There is a sense of sharing one’s being with other phenomena, a sense that we share the same fundamental essence as them. For example, in my research one person told me that “I feel a part of nature … I feel a connection with people, but I also feel connected with trees and birds and grass and hills.” Or more intensely, one person described to me how “the deep aliveness of space is so amazing it takes your words away. I don’t just feel connected to it. I feel like I am it.”

The third type of experience – which I admit is more controversial than the previous two – is ‘interconnectedness of knowing.’ There are many anecdotal reports of individuals spontaneously communicating with each other without any direct interaction. Common experiences are thinking of someone you haven’t seen for years and then receiving a phone call from them and bumping into them on the street. Other examples are having a ‘strong feeling’ that a friend is pregnant, has been diagnosed with a serious illness or has died without being told this – and then finding out that this is the case shortly afterwards. Such incidents might be explained away as coincidence, but there are also scientific experiments which appear to show that such communication can sometimes occur. Some of the most well known are ‘ganzfeld’ experiments, in which a person tries to ‘send’ a randomly chosen target image to a receiver, who then has to choose the correct image from four choices. Obviously, the success rate for this by chance should be 25%. However, ganzfeld experiments consistently show higher levels of success than this. Large scale ganzfeld experiments conducted under the most strongest scientific conditions typically show a success rate of around 35%. This doesn’t seem like a significant figure, but the odds against it occurring by chance are astronomical. Meta-analyses of thousands of experiments conducted over decades show similar results. (1) There is also evidence suggesting that animals – especially dogs – may have a telepathic connection with their owners, which enables them to sense when they are coming home. (2)
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Beyond Materialism

It’s difficult to account for these phenomena from a materialist point of view. Materialists would claim that ‘deep empathy’ doesn’t really exist, and that our altruistic impulses are not due to a sense of connection, but due to a disguised selfishness – e.g. a desire to impress other people, or feel good about ourselves, or a kind of insurance policy to make sure we are helped in return. The sense of connection which awakening experiences can perhaps be explained as wishful thinking, or in terms of unusual brain activity. Similarly, ‘interconnective knowing’ can be explained as coincidence, or in terms of flawed experimental procedures.

However, there is another possibility: that in actuality we are interconnected. It is possible that these three forms of interconnection are not illusions, but the manifestations of a fundamental lack of separation between human beings. This makes no sense from a materialist point of view, but it is possible that what we know as consciousness is not produced by the brain, but is a fundamental quality of the consciousness. This is what is sometimes known as the ‘panpsychist’ view, and it is becoming increasingly popular amongst philosophers and psychologists who struggle to explain consciousness from a materialist perspective. According to panpsychism, consciousness is not dissimilar to mass or gravity – a fundamental, irreducible quality which has always been ‘built into’ the universe. Consciousness is both fundamental and universal – that is, it is everywhere, and in everything (at least potentially). The function of the cells, nervous systems and the human brain is not to ‘receive’ this consciousness and channel it into individual beings.

If we take this view, our own individual consciousness is part of a wider network of consciousness, as a wave is part of an ocean. So it’s not surprising that we are able to tune in to other people’s feelings, to feel a sense of oneness with nature, or sometimes ‘pick up’ on information without any direct communication. We are simply experiencing the fundamental connectedness of all beings, and the universe itself. Feeling, being and information flow between us all, across this network of shared consciousness.
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So we are not enclosed within our own mental space. We are not islands, but part of the ocean. We don’t live in separateness, but in connectedness. We are not alone. Essentially, we are one.

(2) In a long series of experiments over two years with a dog called Jaytee, the paranormal researcher Sheldrake found that it would sit by the window for a significant proportion of the time that her own was on her way home – 55% of the time, compared to just 4% during the rest of her absence. (The difference is highly statistically significant, with odds against chance of over 10,000.) There was a great deal of controversy when the skeptical researcher Richard Wiseman attempted to replicate Rupert Sheldrake’s experiments. Wiseman’s 4 experiments actually yielded an even more positive result than Sheldrake’s – Jaytee sat by the window 78% of the time that her owner was travelling home, compared to 4% during the rest of her absence (Sheldrake, 1999, 2000). % during the rest of her absence (Sheldrake, 1999, 2000). That would seem to be an incontrovertible successful replication of Sheldrake’s experiments. However, Wiseman chose to ignore this data, and instead to use a different criterion of success: Jaytee had to go to sit by the window at the exact moment that her owner set off home. If Jaytee went to the window before this, this would mean that she had ‘failed.’ And not surprisingly, by this criterion, the experiments were judged to be unsuccessful and bizarrely presented as ‘proof’ that Jaytee (and dogs in general) do not have ‘psychic powers’ (Wiseman et al., 1998; Sheldrake, 2000).

Like this:

In the UK, there has been a lot of publicity lately for the idea of “restorative justice.”
As part of this process, offenders are brought face to face with the victims of their crimes, to hear how they have suffered as a result of them. The aim of restorative justice is healing, both for victim and offender. The victim transcends their rage with some understanding and forgiveness towards the offender, and the offender empathises with the victim, becoming aware of the real meaning of their crimes. This process changes lives. Victims feel free of the weight of hatred and are able to move on; offenders have a wider sense of perspective, and are less likely to re-offend. Sometimes offenders don’t meet their specific victims, but just the victims of similar crimes. But this still leads to a new awareness, and new patterns of behaviour.

For me, this highlights the enormous significance of empathy. To a large extent, all human brutality — all oppression, cruelty and most crime — is the result of a lack of empathy. It’s a lack of empathy which makes someone capable of attacking, robbing, raping or oppressing another human being. It’s a lack of empathy for another tribe or country which makes warfare and conflict possible. It’s a lack of empathy towards other ethnic groups, social classes or castes what makes oppression and inequality possible.

What is Empathy?

Empathy is the ability to “feel with” another person, to identify with them and sense what they’re experiencing. It’s sometimes seen as the ability to “read” other people’s emotions, or the ability to imagine what they’re feeling, by “putting yourself in their shoes.” In other words, empathy is seen as a cognitive ability, along the same lines as the ability to imagine future scenarios or to solve problems based on previous experience. But in my view, empathy is more than this. It’s the ability to make a psychic and emotional connection with another person, to actually enter into their mind-space. When we experience real empathy or compassion, in a sense, our identity actually merges with another person’s — your “self-boundary” melts away and the separateness between you and the other person fades.

Our strongly developed sense of individuality — being a personal self, or ego — can make it difficult for us to experience this state of connection. The ego walls us off from other people, particularly those belonging to other groups: the other gender (in the case of female oppression), other tribes, nations, races or classes. It encloses us in a narrow world of our own thoughts and desires, making us so self-absorbed that it’s difficult for us to experience the world from other people’s perspective. Other people become truly “other” to us. And this makes it possible for us to inflict suffering on them, simply because we can’t sense the pain we’re causing them. We can’t feel with them enough to sense their suffering.

On the other hand, if you identify with another person, if you have a psychic and emotional connection with them, then it’s impossible to treat them brutally. You recoil from their experience of suffering in the same way that you recoil from your own suffering. In fact, you feel a strong desire to relieve their suffering and aid their development. But if you can’t identify with them, then there’s no limit to the amount of suffering you can inflict. You can’t sense their pain, so there’s nothing to stop you causing it.

As Restorative Justice shows, empathy can be learned to some degree. When people are brought together in a neutral context, with an open, trusting attitude, empathy naturally establishes itself. Distinctions of ethnicity, religion and other superficial identity badges begin to fade away, as does the sense of grievance and rage derived from past events.

And it’s this bond which is surely our true nature. Empathy shows that the concept of separateness is an illusion. Empathy is simply the experience of our true connectedness, the exchange of feeling through the channel of shared consciousness which unites not just all human beings, but all living and non-living things. The wider empathy stretches from victims to offenders, from one ethnic group to another, from nation to nation and religion to religion, the less brutal and more harmonious the world will become.